And He Was Ours

A story about sketchy neighbors, death, & cats

Mr. Alan is dying, and we’re in the parking lot of a Love’s truck stop in Ozark, Arkansas waiting for a FaceTime call from his hospital room.

He’s had cancer for a couple years, but lately he’s been fading. Last night Alan’s brother sent an urgent message through a friend: “Alan has been intubated. He’s unconscious and unlikely to survive another 48 hours.” We want to see him, even if he can’t see us. As we prepare for the call, rain drumming against the windshield, we hope it’s not too late.

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The oldest picture I have of Mr. Alan with the girls is from January of 2013. London is five. Eve is three. Alan, London, and Eve are sitting on Alan’s porch, the standard meeting place for their little club. Alan has an arm around each girl. In his hands he holds what appear to be handmade birthday cards. I imagine the girls have drawn pictures of cats to celebrate the day. I can’t really tell from the pictures—preschool art leans abstract. But they love Alan, and they love his cats, so we’ll assume: cats. Alan is smiling in that way men do when they are not in the habit of smiling and not particularly amenable to posing for pictures. He seems pained, but he’s not.

He is learning to be happy.

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When Justin and I moved to this house in 2011, a quaint two-bedroom on a sleepy Texas street, we hoped the girls, still babies, would eventually find friends. Mr. Alan was not what we had in mind.

Alan was our to-the-right neighbor. Here are the things I noticed about him upon first inspection:

1. Alan did not have a job. He sat on his porch every day for most of the day smoking cigarettes and staring. Some days he drove his truck to the Wag-a-Bag down the the street and bought a six pack of beer from Becky, our favorite gas station attendant, upon whom he almost certainly had a long-running, unstated crush. Honorably, he almost never drank beer on the porch.

2. Alan wore the same outfit pretty much every day: blue jeans, blue button up shirt (perhaps the very same jeans and shirt, evidenced by wrinkles and stains). He was balding but reluctant to give up his blondish, grayish shoulder length hair. He had a mustache and looked very much like that droopy dog from the old cartoons. Because it should be clear that future-me loves Alan, that Alan will soon become a fixture in our family, you will understand I mean no ill intent when I say, Alan’s physical appearance matched up perfectly to whatever one conjures in one’s head when imagining a pedophile. Is this fair? Not at all. Was it something I had to deal with as the mother of two little girls? Yes.

3. Alan was kind, helpful, and gentle. And he seemed like he needed a friend.

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Jesus said to love your neighbor, and as I have always been eager to obey Jesus (and consummately guilty when I do not obey Jesus), I felt a deep responsibility to love Alan. How though? Over and over my efforts were small and large disasters.

First of all, every time I pulled into my driveway Alan was sitting on the porch. Which meant I would need to talk to Alan. Every single time I pulled into my driveway.

Drop the kids off at preschool, no makeup, hair a wreck, children screaming as I wrestle them into the car for the trip?

Good morning, Alan.

Grab a diet coke at the Wag-a-bag in my pajamas?

Yep; It sure is hot out! [Points to drink] Staying cool!

Home from a long meeting way too late at night?

No, I didn’t see the cops at the neighbor’s. Tell me all about it.

As an introvert and overwhelmed mother of toddlers, the burden of small talk seemed an unscalable mountain.

During our first year as neighbors, Justin and I invited Alan and his mother Billie over for dinner (Alan lived in his elderly mother’s house). The six of us crammed around our tiny table in our nook of a dining room. I attempted to keep our kids from flinging food onto our guests, and Justin served the meal he’d spent two hours cooking— something delicious but so fancy that neither Alan nor his mother knew exactly what it was or how to eat it. They complimented Justin profusely on how pretty the food was and left most of it on their plates.

When you think of loving your neighbor you think of things like mowing the grass and helping bring the trash in and getting their mail when they go out of town. But none of that was going to work in our situation. For one, we were the ones who needed help with the grass (as our to-the-left neighbor proved by regularly mowing our lawn without asking when it got embarrassingly long). For another, Alan was faithful about the trash. He was, after all, sitting on the porch overseeing collection. And finally, Alan never ever went out of town. In the end, he would be the one collecting our mail, and we would be the ones standing in a Croatian gift shop trying to figure out what Alan would think of truffles.

Alan was a good neighbor.

-

I don’t remember when Alan started taking care of all the cats. Maybe he already had a cat when we moved in, but by the time the girls were old enough to play in the front yard, Alan had accumulated a small colony of neighborhood prowlers. A collection of feral cats is called a clowder, a cluster, a clutter, a destruction, a nuisance, or a pounce. Sometimes I’d pull into the driveway to find two cats sitting on my roof, attentive like sentinels. I might have called the cats a host.

There is no surer way to garner the attention and favor of young girls than to become the Pied Piper of cats. So when white cats and black cats and tabby cats and calicos starting showing up at Alan’s porch, so did my daughters.

At first I was hesitant (for all the obvious reasons), so I made a few rules about asking for parental permission, maintaining distance, staying outside, always visiting in twos, promising to report anything weird (that kind of thing). To ensure obedience to the rules, I dragged my computer out to my own small porch and pretended to work while eavesdropping.

London, my eldest, took charge of their first meeting:

Have you named them all?

He hadn’t.

Let’s start with that.

-

Within a week the girls could identify every cat in the neighborhood. They’d meet with Alan almost every day to chart the cats’ growth, habits, and interactions with one another. Carrot was a bully. Whitey hogged the cat food. Midnight hadn’t been around in a while. Was she okay?

One day we arrived home to find Alan on the porch with a surprise. “Come look!” he called as we got out of the truck. Eve tore toward Alan and the kittens he held in his hands. London grimaced at the fleas crawling across their giant blue eyes (already she was forming a care plan). Eve smothered them in kisses. This was the first litter Alan, London, and Eve would parent.

There would be more.

-

The second litter was born in my garage (garage being the word we used for what was basically an attached shed, highly accessible to all sorts of wild creatures). I walked out to get the laundry and found six gray-and-white baby cats. The girls were visiting my mother at the time, so I imagined this to be the perfect opportunity to capture and domesticate a kitten. Maybe if they had their own cat they wouldn’t need to spend so much time at Alan’s.

I trapped the cutest one under a towel, put her in the bathroom, and Googled “how to domesticate a feral cat.” When the girls came home, they named her Professor Minerva McGonagall and carried her in a purse over to show Alan.

Minerva was, and would always be, wild. She could jump from the floor onto the top of the fridge. Sometimes she’d get a case of what London called “the zoomies” and race around the house, taking corners halfway up the wall. One day I came home to find she’d unlocked the back door and welcomed two friends into my kitchen for what can only be described as a party. She rarely wanted to be held.

We adored her.

As did Alan.

When she ran away he drove around the neighborhood looking for her.

-

After Minerva ran away, we adopted two tabby cats from the shelter. We named one Peter Pan and the other Tiger Lily. Both cats enjoyed climbing into the Christmas tree and defecating through the branches onto the presents and Justin promptly decided they would be outside cats. Tiger Lily decided to be an outside cat somewhere else. Peter Pan, plucky as his namesake, had a different idea.

On his first night as an outside cat, Peter snuck into Mr. Alan’s house through an open window. Alan found him lying in his bed. Alan had never had an inside cat, but decided he didn’t much mind the idea. So from then on, Peter lived in our yard during the day and in Alan’s house at night. We bought cat food in giant bags and delivered it to Alan monthly—like a child support payment. We continued calling Peter “Peter.” Alan called him “Pete.” Peter seemed to prefer life as Pete. Eventually he moved yards. We tried not to be offended. Alan was undeniably a better cat parent.

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We lived like this for a long time, with Alan as the adoptive parent of our cat, our house empty of creatures, peaceful and smelling like candles, our children loudly longing for the joy of having a pet who loved them like Pete had come to love Alan.

Justin and I preferred this arrangement. The neighborhood had plenty of cats. Our kids could continue their official meetings with Alan about how best to manage the neighborhood nuisance (or clowder or pounce). We could continue not having a litter box in our bathroom. Win-win.

But then one night London came into the living room crying. She’d read a book about World War I and couldn’t stop thinking about all the people who’d died. Right there in our living room she had a proper fifth grade existential crisis. We talked about death and evil, about chaos and hope. We read a little Ecclesiastes. We encouraged her to pray a lament prayer, showed her how, and then listened as she angrily dumped all of her pain into God’s generous lap. We tucked her into bed close to midnight feeling like very good parents.

And then she said, “If only I had a pet. All of this would be easier.”

Ashamedly I report: Justin and I were not moved.

The next morning I took the girls to school. When I arrived back at the house, Alan approached the car.

Alan: Did you see what happened last night with the house on the corner?

(The house on the corner is home to a drug dealing operation. Alan knows this well because of his extensive time on his porch.)

Me: I didn’t.

Alan: I don’t know how you missed it. ICE raid. They had cars parked everywhere. Took a whole bunch of people out of the house.

Me: Is there anybody still living there?

Alan: I don’t think so. After everything died down, the house seemed empty. But then, before I got up to go inside I saw something walking toward your house in the dark.

My eyes were wide as Alan walked back toward his house and emerged with two kittens, one orange and one solid black (the exact color London has been longing for).

Alan: I think they wandered over from that corner house. I took care of them last night figuring I’d ask you in the morning.

Me: Ask me what?

Alan: If the girls can have them.

I paused.

Me: What time did you say you found them?

Alan: Oh, about midnight.

We kept the black one and took the other to the shelter (sometimes even gifts from God seem like a little too much gift). London named her cat (she was obviously meant to be London’s) Luna. We spoke to Luna mostly in elementary Spanish. She was far and away the best of all the cats.

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We didn’t tell Alan we were moving. Not at first. We didn’t know how.

We said we would, but then, day after day, we didn’t. London would ask every time we pulled into the driveway, “Have you told him yet?”

How could we?

-

After they formed their club on the porch, benevolently ruling their cat kingdom, London, Eve, and Mr. Alan became friends. The girls were quick to call Alan their friend. Alan was quick to be a friend. He wasn’t some kind of surrogate grandparent. He wasn’t a mentor. There was a kind of understood equality in their group. If anything, London was in charge, Eve was the entertainment, and Alan was their eager servant. He was fine with that.

Mr. Alan never forgot a birthday, Valentine’s Day, or Christmas. He bought bags of candy at Halloween just for the moment when London and Eve knocked on his door to show off their Halloween costumes.

He kept an eye on unsavory characters in the neighborhood and let me know when he thought the girls should be careful.

Though always helpful and kind, Alan was gloomy and taciturn when we first moved into the house on Liberty—slow to smile, and slow to engage. By the time London started second grade, he was a different man. He started drinking less. He laughed quickly and freely. He went to Christmas worship at our church and sat next to Becky from Wag-a-Bag (who the girls had also conveniently invited). He talked about getting a trailer by the ocean and fishing all day. I thought he just might.

But then his mom got sick, too sick to leave the house. His brother moved in to help take care of her. But then his brother’s wife got dementia, wandering around the neighborhood throwing curses into the air like confetti from a gun. Sometimes we’d come home to an ambulance in Alan’s yard, there to take Miss Billie to the hospital. Other times we’d find a police car picking up Alan’s sister-in-law who could not be stopped from beating up her husband.

Eventually Miss Billie would end up in the nursing home at the end of our street. I took the girls to see her. She didn’t recognize us.

When it was time for Billie to die, back in her own bed in her own house, Justin was there in the room. Alan had knocked on our door to tell us death was close. He asked Justin to come pray. So Justin did. It was the first time he’d entered Alan’s house. We’d been neighbors for 8 years.

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So you can see why we didn’t want to tell Alan we were moving. His mother had died. His sister-in-law had died. One of his favorite cats had cancer. And as far as we could tell, our fifth and sixth grade daughters were his best friends in the world.

The day before they put the For Sale sign in the yard we told him. And then we went into the house and cried.

-

Moving across town doesn’t usually mean the end of a friendship, but our friendship with Alan was built almost entirely on proximity. Even the cats only connected us via shared experience rooted in geographic correspondence. We had nothing else in common. We didn’t even have Alan’s number in our phones. We’d never needed to call. We just stuck our heads out the front door and looked to see if he was on the porch.

We moved in December of 2019. We didn’t see Alan again until after COVID restrictions had lifted. By then we knew we were moving again, this time across an ocean. We invited Alan to dinner at our new house. He brought the girls presents. They told him about school and friends and church and what kinds of wild animals sometimes crossed the field in the back of the house. He held Luna; his eyes lit up when he saw her, well-cared-for and thriving (clearly we were learning to do better by our pets). We ate something not-fancy, maybe fried chicken and macaroni and cheese. He cleaned his plate. He looked at our new house like it was a castle. I think he was proud.

The whole evening felt like the well-crafted finale of a favorite tv show. When we said goodbye we all knew, somehow, that this was the end.

-

While we were living in South Africa we found out Alan had cancer. The girls sent cards. We moved back to America. And then the message from Alan’s brother.

That’s why we’re sitting in our car at a truck stop in the rain waiting to talk to our friend.

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When the phone rings and the video call starts we see Alan is alert. He’s still intubated and can’t talk, but he can see us. He knows we’re there. And though he’s bald and tired, more skeleton than himself, he is beaming. He draws a heart in the air with his fingers.

Mr. Alan, dying, is happy. He’s happy to see “those girls.” That’s what he’d call them if he could speak. He’d say, “Look at those girls.”

And look he does. He stares at the phone as if those faces on that screen are the faces of God Himself.

Justin, so experienced beside hospital beds, asks the right questions and says the kind things. He is all peace and comfort. London, fifteen, gentle and wise, prays for her friend. Her prayer feels like an offered hand on a rocky path. Eve, fourteen, deep like a well of fresh water, sings “Amazing Grace.” And then me. Words burst from a broken heart: “That grace is for you, Alan. I know you don’t think you deserve it. But it’s yours. Take it.”

We hang up the phone.

-

Alan died the next morning.

-

Years ago I attended a lecture on the parable of The Good Samaritan. It’s the story that comes as an illustration of the greatest command. Jesus says to love your neighbor as yourself. The pharisee asks, “Who is my neighbor?” And then Jesus tells the story of a man who fell among thieves, was beaten and robbed, and then ignored by religious leaders and men of prestige only to be rescued by a Samaritan (enmity personified). The parable is commonly interpreted as admonition: Don’t be like the proud and selfish leaders; be a neighbor like the Samaritan. I’ve tried to be the good Samaritan my whole life. Occasionally, by the grace of God, I’ve done okay.

But in this lecture the speaker asked us to identify with the man who’d been beaten, the one without the power or volition. He said, “Imagine you’re lying in a ditch. Who is your neighbor? Ask yourself, Who will I let be a neighbor to me?”

When we moved into the house on Liberty, I wanted to love my neighbor because Jesus told me to. I struggled to love my neighbor at first, because he was strange and gloomy and smelled like smoke. I thought he was the man lying in the ditch. I thought it was my job to help. But looking back at that young woman trying to raise two little girls, be a good wife, juggle the responsibilities of being a preacher’s wife and being self employed, alternating between bouts of depression, self doubt, and crippling pride, digging out from under a load of financial turmoil, alone in a new place, collecting speeding tickets like charms on a bracelet, I’ve realized, maybe I was the one in the ditch.

Maybe Alan and I both were in the ditch, and “those girls” were the good Samaritans (though it seems Alan and Justin and I all pulled London and Eve out of ditches daily).

Obviously Justin was the goodest Samaritan. But still, there he is across the room listening to me read this, tears painting his face, thankful, saved.

Whatever’s true, this is truest: Mr. Alan and I were neighbors.

We were his. And he was ours.

-JL